Magento Site Performance Optimization

Chapter 2
The keepAlive and max processes
In this second round for optimizing Apache2, we will use the keepAlive module,
which authorizes to keep a connection alive longer than usual. As such, our server
will not deal with opening and closing the TCP connection as often as before. In
order to do so, you have to again open the .htaccess file at the root directory of your
Magento and add the following code:
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 15
Activate the corresponding module and restart the Apache service using the
following commands:
sudo a2enmod header
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
We will continue to optimize our Apache2 server by reducing the number of processes
it is allowed to create in our server. The first thing is to determine how much memory
a process needs to run. In order to discover this value, you can simply run a test using
Apache Benchmark and run the following command on your host server:
$ top
The preceding command will show you the running processes on your server and
the memory that each process will occupy.
In our case, the Apache2 processes require 42 MB of memory while under charge
and we have 2048 MB of memory available. As we have other services running on
your server (MySQL and so on), we cannot dedicate all our memory to Apache2. We
choose to dedicate 1 GB. So, we have divided 1048 MB of memory by 42 MB, which
gives us almost 25. This means that Apache2 can create 25 processes, which each
requiring 42 MB of RAM before jamming the other services on the server. To set the
new value of the max, add the following to the .htaccess file:
StartServers 25
MinSpareServers 25
MaxSpareServers 35
ServerLimit 256
MaxClients 256
MaxRequestsPerChild 10000
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